Israel nanotech breakthrough targets tumours with anti-cancer drugs

Drugs that kill cells in solid cancers can be wrapped in a "nanometric package" instead of being dispersed throughout the body, damaging healthy tissues and nausea due to damage to intestinal tissue, hair loss and more serious side effects.

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have developed an automatic system for the design and preparation of stabilizing materials to produce such a "nanometric package" - a platform for delivering drugs directly to cancer centcentresthe body, The Jerusalem Post reports.

In an article just published in the journal Biomaterials under the title "Automated discovery of nanomaterials via drug aggregation-induced emission", the researchers report that by using their innovative system, they developed the necessary materials to create the platform and even showed in preclinical experiments that it is effective against solid malignancies.

The research was conducted in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering under the leadership of doctoral student Yuval Harris and lab director Dr Hagit Sason-Bauer. They worked with Assistant Prof. Yosi Shamay, an expert in biomedical engineering for anticancer nanomedicine and nanoinformatics.

Anti-cancer drugs such as chemotherapy and kinase inhibitors are designed to destroy cancer cells, but one of their main problems is that only a small fraction of the medicinal substance reaches its destination – the cancer cells themselves. The rest can damage healthy tissues.

The Technion researchers present a breakthrough in this field – an automated process for developing optimal materials for preparing these capsules. The process is used both as a robot-chemist that synthesizes new materials and as a robot-pharmacist that formulates them into nanocapsules containing the anti-cancer drug.

The new material, named R595, was created in a "green" chemical reaction that does not require the use of polluting and toxic organic solvents. It has very high efficiency of drug loading (90 per cent), which makes it possible to predict the treatment's effectiveness. In preclinical trials, the capsule was effective in the treatment of solid tumours caused by a mutation common in lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and intestinal cancer.